This will be a first stab at a rationalization for the existence of physics. It will be a 'just so' story of a postmodern kind.

Why anything should exist at all may be a non-trivial question, even though it is difficult to imagine the alternative, and given that something does exist, it becomes a moot point.

The next question would concern the nature of primordial existence, and how our world might have emerged from it. Historically there have been two alternatives for primordial existence: God and the 'big bang.' Both of these alternatives suffer from the improbability of their initial conditions. One would have to postulate an infinite number of either sort of initial conditions and then suppose that our world is one of a very small subset of outcomes.

To mitigate the apparent improbabilities associated with our particular big bang, modern materialists are finding it necessary to posit an atemporal, non-spatial, preexistent quantum chaos that could support an infinite number of virtual universes -- an infinite chaotic foam of mini-bangs, interspersed with a few big bangs, one of which happens to be ours. Let us designate this primordial chaos as a 'noumenal domain.' A much tamer version of this noumenal domain is even observable under laboratory conditions in the peculiar quantum phenomenon of 'vacuum polarization.'

As if this development were not sufficiently alarming, materialists are having to face up to another, similar dilemma. Lately the 'consciousness movement' has become fashionable in higher academe, wherein eliminative materialists find themselves in jeopardy of being eliminated. In order to avoid the positing of a special creation, or mini-bang, for the human psyche, materialists are having to reconsider panpsychism -- call it agnostic materialism, neutral monism or dual property physicalism, if you will.

It appears that we have two pills to swallow, panpsychism and a primordial noumenal domain. It should be very tempting to philosophers at this juncture to reconsider Kant. Both pills could be swallowed quite easily by simply supposing that our phenomenal realm is the evolving construct of a co-evolving panpsychism operating in the noumenal realm. Thus we could quite reasonably entertain the evolution of physics. This would certainly be the end of the line for materialism, but why should that be at all disheartening? We have nothing to lose, but our chains! Where is it written in the contract that philosophers must perpetually apologize for their plodding academic brethren?

I am not suggesting that our particular world has evolved from scratch. That seems not to have been the case. It would be quite reasonable to suppose that our very robust and natural appearing phenomenal realm was several 'generations' removed from the primordial rendering plant. Our little cosmic dining room has thankfully been mostly shielded from the cosmic kitchen. Only in a nightmare or in a psychotic break would we come in contact with that other side of the cosmic tracks.

It does look as though we are about to awaken en masse from our splendid Copernican isolation, from our slumber of materialism. The other worlds that we glimpse through our telescopes are but tokens of a much less structured world that is no further from us than our next dream.

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rev. 11/16/97